Seminar Review: The Provision of and (Just) Access to Housing: Insights from Malaysia and Indonesia

Housing has been an undeniable primary aspect of human life. Without a proper shelter, a person cannot fulfill his/her basic need in life. This need has given more pressure when we know that there is only a limited amount of land that can be utilized for it. On other side, the competition to obtain a proper housing is getting more intense overtime due to urbanization (more people are coming to urban area to settle in). That is the exact reason why the price for this resource is skyrocketed to the point of no return.

After joining this forum, my view regarding this topic has widen because of the appearance of two issues: 1) young generation and 2) disruption. In this era, the market segment that will receive the most impact from the housing problem is the young generation (millennial and Gen-Z). It is make sense because they are the individuals who are just having a status of fresh graduate or entry-level career in their life, while the price to own a house is already beyond their current affordability to pay (ATP). However, I also just found out from Mr. Deva that the young generations have a different ‘customer behaviour’ where they don’t need to have an ‘ownership’ to the property. They prefer to ‘rent’ a place for stay (whether it is for short or long term) as long as it can accommodate their travel behaviour to the job or some places. From this point, I wonder if this change of behaviour of young generation is caused by the current situation of housing market OR something else? Because beside the internal factor, I also can see that there is an external factor that ‘might be’ affect the preference of young generation, such as disruption of technology. With the emergence of telecommunication technology, particularly after the COVID-19 era, the younger generation doesn’t need to live close to their jobs. They can work remotely from home, etc.

The disruption of technology is not also affecting the customer behaviour, but also affecting the market of affordable housing. For instance, I will bring up the issue of ‘Airbnb’ which I just found when I did my project in FSDS coursework. The existence of Airbnb platform, which provide a short-stay for tourists, has opened a new possibility for property owners to gain more profit than renting their house for the local people with a long-stay scheme. This ‘Airbnb’ scheme is also encouraging the developers to build real estate dedicated for tourism, instead of traditional housing. This modus is well-known with the name of ‘Ghost Hotel’ where it has been happening across big cities. In the end, ‘Airbnb’ limits the supply of housing, increases the price and finally burdens more the local people to obtain an affordable housing.

Some of the movements are trying to prevent the negative impact of disruption like what Inside Airbnb has done. However, to some extent I agree with what Mrs. Suzylah has said in the forum: it can be managed effectively with the government intervention. The government should be more adaptive to the issue of global disruption and create a proper policy where it can determine which housing that can use Airbnb scheme or not.

One thing for sure: in this democratic system, we cannot change the customer behaviour. Mrs. Temi said that we can focus more in understanding the pattern and create a strategic countermeasure so that there is no ‘a homeless generation’ in the near future, for instance like improving affordability to pay of young generation or implementing the housing career.

Best gratitude to the Pusat Riset Kependudukan BRIN for holding this discussion. Looking forward for the next event.